114 - Hezekiah's Response to International Intimidation - Part 1 [A]

Hezekiah's Response to International Intimidation. 2 Kings 19

It seems as if every week something new happens on the news and something more interesting than the week before comes up. This last week we started off with the crisis and the argument going on about whether or not this Islamic mosque or so-called community center should be built within a couple of blocks of where the trade center had stood, and then the week developed into the controversy generated by the pastor in Florida over burning Korans. Then the week ended with a remembrance of what occurred when our nation was attacked so violently some nine years ago on the morning of September 11^th by Islamic jihadists.

We spent time yesterday watching some of the news coverage that was played again of what happened nine years ago because we need to be reminded of what went on: why we are still in Afghanistan, why our military forces are committed overseas, why we are having this huge debate over whether or not the mosque ought to be built two blocks from where the world trade center was. It gives us the opportunity to reflect on what we learned or what we haven't learned in the last nine years. It was said nine years ago from the pulpit that within ten years we would forget its significance and we would be back to the same basic problems, the same basic approaches to international relations, etc. that had characterized this county for the last 15-20 years, that the lessons that we should have learned would have been forgotten. Pretty much that is true. Many people in this nation have just forgotten what happened and they still don't understand why it happened.

We ought to ask that question: why is it that we can't come to grips with what happened on 9/11? Why is it that we can't really come to an understanding of why we were attacked and what the real issues were in that attack that occurred nine years ago? There are voices that clearly teach the truth and have written about this and explained the truth but yet there is this enormous cultural resistance to accepting that truth and to facing the threat of Islamicism/ radical Islam/ Islamic terrorism, or however we want to phrase it. We have this resistance to properly identifying the problem. If we can't identify a problem, whatever it is in life, we can never properly solve it. If we are off target 180 degrees our solution will be off target 180 degrees, and to the degree that our solution is off target we will never experience the benefit of our solution. In fact, we might even adopt solutions that are completely erroneous and just generate more and more problems.

What we continue to demonstrate in our modern American culture is that we don't learn anything from history, and the proverb is that if we don't learn from history we are doomed to repeat history. And we do continue to make the same errors that have been made for many years in this nation because ultimately the problem comes down to a spiritual issue. We live is a culture that is the poster child of suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. As a culture western civilization has moved progressively away from a Biblical worldview to a totally secular worldview, a postmodern worldview, and the further we get away from the truth the more we are blind to the truth and the less able we are to realistically assess what the issues are and what the problems are.

In our study of 2 Kings we come to a set of circumstances in the history of the southern kingdom of Judah under King Hezekiah that has a lot of parallels with our current situation as a nation, and we can learn a lot of principles from it.  As we look at any issue in life, especially issues related to something as momentous as these events that we've seen over the past ten years, and even further back, that were consistently ignored, the solutions are always going to be wrong if we can't identify the problem. To identify the problem means that we have to be able to identify it in terms of spiritual truth, and when we are operating on a purely secular worldview model we can't honestly have a debate in the culture about a spiritual issue. As long as we can't have a debate and discuss the spiritual issue as it relates to day-to-day issues we will constantly make the same mistakes.

Whatever the issues are it is interesting how people answer the questions. No matter how disconnected those particular issues are they tend to fall out into the same groups, no matter how disparate they are. When you ask the question, whatever the issue is, and get the answers the same people tend to line up on the same side of the issue for every issue. Why is that? It has to do with underlying ways of thinking, subterranean things that aren't on the surface. At some level we have to ask the question: is it right or is it wrong? When we answer we have immediately brought in a value system. What is tour value system? We rarely get into the debate at this level, and this isn't even where the debate should be. This is why we need to think more deeply about issues. The issue is how we are going to determine what is right or wrong. If we get into a discussion with a family member or friend, or somebody we work with about what is going on with the burning of the Korans or the mosque in New York or the bail-outs in the economy, or whatever it is, and we say we don't think that is the right way to do it, we have brought into the discussion some sort of value system. And that also brings the question: how do we know that this is right or that is right? Where do we get this idea that this action is right or that action is right? That is the question in philosophy called epistemology, which basically means the study of knowledge, or whow do you know what you know?

If you have made a value judgment that this is right and that is wrong, then how do you know what is right or wrong? Where do you get those ideas? For Christians that comes from the Bible, and when we talk about the sufficiency of the Word that means that we believe that the Bible gives us a framework to think about everything that we face in life. You can't go to anything in life and say, The Bible doesn't address that, you are just completely on your own with no divine guidance whatsoever as to how to think about that particular subject. But people want to do that all the time, mostly because we are arrogant and want to do things our way and don't want God to talk to us about our opinions, about our music or money or whatever it may be. But if we are honest we have to recognize that the Biblical viewpoint is that the Bible gives us the way to think about every issue in life.

But that presupposes something else, and this is where the real debate is. It comes down to the issue of metaphysics, as the philosophers talk about is, and we would just say the existence of God. Not only is there a God, but what is God like? If we have a god that is Allah, i.e. the god of Islam, then that is going to change how we know something and then that is going to, again, change our value system as to what is right or what is wrong, and it is going to affect what we think about political or national issues and individual choices. If our view is that there is no God, that everything is chance and we are just an accident in time, that a bolt of lightning hit a blob of slime and several million years later we developed—we are just an accident in life and there is no more meaning in life than that—then we can't rally know anything for sure. This is the whole postmodern way of looking at things: you have your truth and I have my truth and as long as it works for us at the time then we are okay. So it affects our way of knowing truth and it becomes very changeable; it is very fluid. Just think of what kind of courage and conviction we have if our basis for knowledge is so ephemeral and so fluid, that one day it is right and the next day it could be wrong.

If our basic epistemology we can't have confidence or certainty in anything that we do. How does that affect us of we are on the battlefield? If we are left in a position of: well, I really don't want to do this or do that, it may upset the other person. It wipes out courage whether we are talking about spiritual courage or moral courage or battle courage. If there is no conviction of truth, of right or wrong, then we can't have real convictions and certainty and confidence when we are in a high pressure situation. So how we know things is important. If we are a secular relativist that can affect our ethics: anything could be right; anything could be wrong, and that in turn is going to affect how we think about national policy, national decisions, or our own personal morality, how we handle problems that come up in marriage and child rearing, how we handle money, etc.

This is where the real issues lie and it is why we have cultural wars in our society, and why we see more and more of a polarization taking place within our culture on more and more issues is because of the disagreement that occurs at that upper level of the political-national debate, or even individual decisions, is grounded vastly different beliefs about the ultimate nature of reality and God. People are more consistent than we give them credit for. They may not have thought it through consciously but if they don't believe in God then they are living as if there is no God. If people believe there is a God to whom they will be held accountable at some time in the future for their decisions and actions then they are going to live accordingly, unless, of course, they are just in disobedience to God. So this is how we ought to look at things and it also gives us a bit of a grid for helping to understand why certain people take certain actions in the Scripture and why they don't. And this is where we come to learn application of the Scripture, to think a little more deeply about what is going in instead of just looking at Hezekiah and saying, well, this a nice lesson on prayer. But that is only at the surface, we need to think a little more deeply about this or we won't really understand the lessons for prayer that come out of these next couple of chapters.

Practically, as we face pressures in life—adversity, hostility, national debates, etc.—they should drive us further down to the lower level and that is where the discussion, the thinking, needs to take place because that area determines what happens. What we have in a culture that doesn't think in this area is that it ignores it completely. Even the statement "you can believe anything you want, it really doesn't matter" (freedom of religion) reflects a view of God and a view of knowledge that is completely antithetical to the view of knowledge and of God that the founders had when they wrote the First Amendment. So by thinking differently about God we think differently about the First Amendment.

There are some interesting parallels as we look at Hezekiah with today

1. Hezekiah faced an enemy which sought to destroy the nation. Judah's was a different kind of enemy, though; it was a national enemy or an empire that has as its stated goal world dominance. Assyria was wiping out all of the nations and city states that existed in the Middle East. It would come in and take the people and deport them, moving them all over the empire and scattering them so that it would completely wipe out and destroy that culture and that ethnic group.
2. The enemy used a religious framework to attempt to intimidate the Jews. 
3. Judah as a nation was not the aggressor and they were not responsible for the attack. Although there were probably liberals in Judah and Jerusalem who were saying that if Hezekiah had just paid the tribute money this would not have happened, that it was all his fault that they were being attacked.
4. Assyria, on the basis of their pagan worldview and their idols, gods and goddesses, desired world domination and sought to dominate the God of other nations and to impose their culture on the others.

The parallel today

1. We are faced with an enemy which seeks to destroy our nation, and not just our nation but every nation and bring it under the banner of Islam because that is what is written within the Koran. The objective of Islam is world domination. It is not simply a religious system; it is a system of law (Sharia) that is to impose itself upon the entire world. You can't separate Sharia law and the ultimate goal of world domination. It is carried out by peaceful means if necessary but if not then just pull out the swords and lop heads off and impose it violently. That is how Islam spread from the very beginning.
2.  The enemy uses a religious rationale to intimidate the west. If some thing offends they riot. The west, because it has lost any conviction of courage immediately kow-tows and grovels on the ground to the Muslims because they are afraid something is going to happen to them. They give in to the intimidation because they have no moral courage or spiritual courage because once you get rid of the idea of God and of absolutes you don't have a foundation for thinking in terms of convictions and certainty; you lose the basis for courage and just become a wimp, totally susceptible for intimidation. That's why they keep doing it. They didn't do it for many years because the west stood up to them.
3. The US and the west are not the aggressors. There is nothing that the west did that justifies the assault on 9/11.
4. Islam is a pagan worldview, just like the pagan worldview that dominated Assyria, and it includes a religious and legal system. Many worldviews don't overtly have a legal system, but it is covert and implied within their way of thinking. In Islam it is overt, its legal system of Sharia law by which it seeks to dominate the west.

As Hezekiah faces this threat we can learn what the right solution is and what the wrong solution is. Jeremiah 17:5 ^NASB "Thus says the LORD, 'Cursed is the man who trusts in mankind And makes flesh his strength, And whose heart turns away from the LORD.'" That is the fundamental problem: when man puts his confidence—reliance and dependence upon something as the ultimate source of strength and security—in man it is unstable and is going to fall apart. The first thing we see emphasized in this verse is volition. Man can trust in man or in God; he has to make a decision as to what his ultimate truth is. The word "heart" incorporates his thinking. It is not just that for a moment here he trusts in man rather than God, but his system of thought departs from God; he gets totally into human viewpoint as opposed to divine viewpoint; he gets into some form of paganism, some form of humanism, some form of human viewpoint philosophy or methodology that is contradictory to the Scriptures. Hezekiah is going to trust in man rather than God and for knowledge he puts "his whole heart," his whole system departs from the Lord, he is going to generate his own way of thinking.

In the next verse we see the consequence of that. Jeremiah 17:6 ^NASB "For he will be like a bush in the desert And will not see when prosperity comes, But will live in stony wastes in the wilderness, A land of salt without inhabitant." The bush in the desert picks up a metaphor here. It doesn't have much of a resource, there is not much water out there, its growth is limited, its fruitfulness and productivity is limited. So by not trusting in God but trusting in man there is going to be limited productivity. If our thinking departs from God not only does it affect our whole way of thinking—it departs from the Lord—but it affects us in the pocket book, economics, productivity. Seeing is a term related to knowledge. When we change our way of think we are not able to see, there is no perception of good or prosperity. What the Scriptures affirm here is that if we are not trusting in God then this changes the thought system in terms of epistemology, it affects ability to discern and to make good decisions, which means we are unable to identify reality as it is. Then bush inhabits the parched places of the wilderness—there is no productivity here, no fertility, no economic prosperity, no advance in the stock market; everything is going to dry up and create even further significant consequences. It leads to destruction: "There is a way that seems right to man, but the end thereof is death."

In contrast: Jeremiah 17:7 ^NASB "Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD And whose trust is the LORD." It is interesting to see this parallel between trust and hope. We often think that hope is some sort of wishful optimism, but hope in the Scripture is a confident expectation. It is parallel or synonymous to the word batach, because we trust and rely and are dependent upon the Lord we can then have confidence. When we have confidence we can then makes decisions from a position of strength and when the enemy starts sending out his propaganda team and tries to intimidate with all kinds of temper tantrums we not going to start cowering. [8] "For he will be like a tree planted by the water, That extends its roots by a stream And will not fear when the heat comes; But its leaves will be green, And it will not be anxious in a year of drought Nor cease to yield fruit." The result of putting our focus on the Lord is that there is prosperity, fertility, growth. The picture here is something that is very attractive, a picture of expansiveness. No "fear when heat comes." In pressure situations there is no response out of fear. There is confidence because we know what truth is, because we understand the reality of the world. When things do go bad because of natural cycles we "will not be anxious in a year of drought." We must function on the absolutes of divine viewpoint, and we won't "cease to yield fruit." God is still going to produce fruitfulness and productivity in the culture.

What we forget is that when we live in a secular society we have made everything the result of man's decisions. When we make everything the result of man's decisions and we take God out of the picture we can't properly interpret anything because what Scripture says is that the truth is that the ultimate causative factor in everything in life is God, not us. We can make bad decisions and they are going to bring certain consequences but we are talking in a broad scheme of things, that if a nation is dependent upon God then God is going to protect it and watch over it. That is the message to Israel.

When we come to Hezekiah we realize just what a spiritual giant he was in the Old Testament. We see the praise that he gets. 2 Chronicles 31:20 ^NASB "Thus Hezekiah did throughout all Judah; and he did what {was} good, right and true before the LORD his God." That is not said of anybody else, except David. [21] "Every work which he began in the service of the house of God in law and in commandment, seeking his God, he did with all his heart and prospered." 2 Kings 18:5 ^NASB "He trusted in the LORD, the God of Israel; so that after him there was none like him among all the kings of Judah, nor {among those} who were before him." The only king that was more of a spiritual giant than Hezekiah was David. Does that mean Hezekiah didn't make mistakes? No, he made mistakes just as David did, but he understood that the real issue in life is going to be trusting in God.

So when he is faced with this enemy at the gate Hezekiah has already turned back to God, and he is going to God again in prayer. But prayer is the action plan that is the result of a previously set way of thinking: "Blessed is the man who trusts in God." Because he has already made that decision his prayer isn't an act of desperation, the situation is extreme but he is not in a panic mode, and he goes into the house of the Lord understanding exactly what the dimensions are. It is not a matter of military tactics, technology, being in the right political party being whatever is governing the country; it is an ultimate matter of being humble under the authority of God. He is there personally and now as the leader of the people is going to express that in a remarkable way in his prayer.

We see that there is a prayer that is unstated here but we see the answer to it in 2 Kings 19:6 ^NASB "Isaiah said to them, 'Thus you shall say to your master, 'Thus says the LORD, 'Do not be afraid because of the words that you have heard, with which the servants of the king of Assyria have blasphemed Me.'" There is a second prayer later on, and we see the priority of prayer. Prayer really does change things.

Illustrations